Mobile Data Analytics

Mobile Data: Under the Hood
Munich DataGeeks Meetup
June 2014

• Data collection has meandered from engineering to humanities and back:
• Its origins are in population statistics and taxation, beginning from the late mediaval time; the age
of enlightenment brought scientific data to the top, with its peak in 19th century
thermodynamics; the rise of quantitative social science in the mid 20th century brought
humanities back, namely in the form of market research and media planning.
• With the Internet of Things, engineering as prime source of data seams logic, however: it is
people whos behavior stands behind most machine generated data, too.
2 Mobile Data: Unter the Hood. Datarella - Joerg Blumtritt

• Two scholars are particularily influencial in
the field of wearable technology and mobile
data generation.
• Most prominent figure might still be Steve
Mann, whose cyborgist wirring has provoced
hostile reactions.
• Mann is noteworthy also for his discussion
on counter-surveillance, souvaillance, and
other political implications of tracking
technology.
• Application of smartphone technology,
especially the smartphones sensors has
been brought forward by Alex Pentland.
• Many papers by Pentland and his students
have inspired our work, too.
4
Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title
=User:Glogger&action=edit&redlink=1
(CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Robert Scoble
(CC)
Mobile Data: Unter the Hood. Datarella - Joerg Blumtritt

All seeing research?
• Social studies bear an inherrent problem:
either you could afford to long-term track or
you could try to drill down in depth to some
aspects. Both is hardly possible (too
expensive and too intrusive for people's
lives to carried out).
• Seamless tracking via devices we carry with
us anyway, offers a solution to this dilemma.
5
1) Reality Mining [8], (2) Social evolution [11], (3) Friends and
Family dataset, (4) Rich-data pioneers [15,16], (5)
Sociometric Badge studies [14], (6) Midwest field station
[17], (7) Framingham Heart Study [4], (8) Large call record
datasets [5,1,6], (9) ‘‘Omniscient’’/all-seeing view.
Aharony et.al:, "Social fMRI, investigating and shaping social
mechanism in the real world", Pervasive and Mobile
Computing, Vol. 7, 2011, pp. 643-659.

Sociometric Solutions
• Sociometric Solutions is a team that uses
mobile sensor technology, stripped bare
of all "classic" phone functions.
• The participants of a survey would carry
the badge and get tracked in multiple
ways: sounds, movements,
communications, and proximitiy with
others are continuously monitored.
• Sociometric Solutions can e.g. derive
network analytics from the data, showing
how efficient people would interact in
businesses. (Ben Waber, founder of the
startup, presented the example below at
Strata Conference 2012: Three branches
of a bank. Branch 2 shows two distinct
clusters - people hardly interacting in
between; the reason: two departments
sitting on seperate floors, which could be
easily solved by mixing the teams, once
the problem had been discovered).

getsaga.com
• Lifelogging as storytelling, supported by
technology, is the appealing task of getsaga.
• Data here is not seen as "facts" (like in self-
tracking gadgets that monitor e.g. your running).
• Data is like memories and embedded into
narrative context.
• The data collections is syndicated with various app-based services, people would use anyway:
foursquare, fitbit, Jawbone, and even Withings.
• These data silos usually collect data just in their very limited context; with getsage all tracking
data can be synoptically brought into "the story of your daily life".

"Social MRI"
• Like MRI makes you see your innards in
detail without loosing the full picture, Nadav
Aharony proposed using mobile data to get
to "Social MRI" - studying behavior on the
individual level but in social context.
• The startup Behavio, that was spun off a
remarkable research project at MIT was
acquired by Google. Never heard of them
eversince again.
• (His readworthy paper was sourced on p 5)

Sad reality
• Quantitative social science is in dismay. What used to be "good
enough", like pulling representative samples just by picking random
phone numbers is helplessly exposed as a blunt tool. The construct of
presuming, people would be similar enough in all of their
characteristics, just because they would share some broad aspects of
demographics, has probably never been true. With the rise of online
tracking, click analytics etc., we have learned how misleading the
assumption of representativeness can be.
• Postmodernist thinking, and especially Alain Badiou's "Being and
Event" is helpful to deconstruct the fallacies of quant social research.
• With people switching from desktop computers to mobile, research
companies try to adopt their crude online questionnairs to the new
screen. The result is pathetic.

Technical Tracking
• Smartphones carry a phalanx of sensors and
track all kind of environmental data.
• Our movements and immediate
surroundings are monitored by gyroscope,
accelerometer, luminosity sensor in the
camera, microphone etc.
• The location is captured by satellite
connection and mobile network.
• Proximity can be trackt via bluetooth or Wifi
signal (which just becomes systematically
useable with the iBeacon)
10
Pei et.al.: "Human Behavior Cognition Using Smartphone Sensors"
Sensors 2013, 13, 1402-1424; doi:10.3390/s130201402

Context
• Technical data does not reveal the full story.
Just because somebody went to some place
does not tell what she did there, how she felt,
if she succeded, and how this action related
to the rest of her life.
• So it makes sense to ask people directly, to
engange in personal interaction, if we want to
study their lives.
11
Pei et.al.: "Human Behavior Cognition Using Smartphone Sensors"
Sensors 2013, 13, 1402-1424; doi:10.3390/s130201402

Our App: explore
• We started our own app 'explore':
• explore tracks all kinds of sensor data on
the smartphone. The data can be collected
for analysis, and it can trigger interactions
(like asking questions or offering
suggestions).
• The open beta is available on Google Play
Store; the iOS version should be ready by
July 2014.

Usability
• To avoid the shortcommings of the
other social research apps, we
focused on the user interface, to make
it as "mobile" as possible.

Interactions
• explore can ask questions or offer suggestions, triggered by data.

Quantified Self
• explore offers clear and simple analytics of
the data collected. People can also get their
raw-data for their own purposes.
• We want people to be aware what we (and
other apps) do on the phone. So we do not
only tell in advance, we also show what
sensors are activated and give the
opportunity to opt-out per sensor.
• Since we reflect the results of our tracking as
well as questionnairs and interactions in form
of diagrams and sumaries, we hope, people
will realize what we are doing and can act
self-determined.
• Of couse we respect take-down notices: if
people ask for their data to be deleted, we
follow their request (which btw is also
required by German data protection laws);
this is also a reason for us not to use
common cloud storage and cloud computing
platforms, since we would not have control
over the back-up.
Mobile Data: Unter the Hood. Datarella - Joerg Blumtritt15

Data
• Sensor data is generated mostly in forms of
tables, locally stored as SQL databases for
each app. We transfer the data to analyze
it, e.g. visualize geo-location on a map.

Travel
• Studying the means of transportation, they
paths, people choose for their communte
or travel, is a streightforward application of
our data.
• We work e.g. for airports to optimize the
shops they would offer to passengers. Since
many passengers come from other
cultures, it is not an easy task for an airport
(or in general for a shopping mall) to learn
the preferences of potential clients - not
consitent shopping data or market research
is available.
• So, e.g. we incentivize passengers from
China to let us accompany their stay in
Euorpe with our app 'explore'. So we can
understand, what they wanted to buy, if
they succeded and if they would have
missed anything, that an airport could have
offered to them.

Events
• To see what happens, we have to process the
data. How people move arround is visible
through the gyroscope - you see the turns,
changes in directions ect.
• With gyroscopic data in combination with
acceleration and speed, also the means of
transportation can be revealed: walking has a
distinct signature, driving by car shows more
changes in directions then sitting on a train, etc.
• However: the data is noisy; artefacts emerge
from different brands of the sensors, of glitches
in the operating systems, and also can be caused
by environmental influences.
• Take e.g. the rhytmik spikes in the picture below:
nobody would turn rhythmically and so fast.
• So we have to preprocess the data in the app, to
really see, what happens.

What is behavior?
• The normalized gyroscopic data on the right
shows the movements of a person going
from her desk into the kitchen, fixing a pot
of tea, leaving the kitchen and returning to
her desk.
• Sampling rate was 10s, timeframe is 15min.
• We notice episodes of different behavior:
• turning sharply
• walking
• turning smoothly
• walking again
• entering the kitchen, preparing the pot
• waiting for the water to boil
• standing up, leaving the kitchen
• sitting down again
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1,0
2,0
3,0
4,0
5,0
6,0
7,0
8,0
9,0
1 4 7 1013161922252831343740434649525558616467707376798285

Complex Event Processing
• Simple events, like changing direction,
entering an area of specific geo-
coordinates, or having moved for a
specific time span can be combined to
complex events.
• EPL (event processing language) offeres
a way to listen to the data stream and
detect the occurance of events.
• EPL looks like SQL, but instead of
tables, the search goes into the data
stream.
• For our app, we define events, boolean-
combine these events in a GUI and
parse the definition in the app via JSON
doc.
• The event processing itself takes place
in the app - no network connection is
needed.
20
SELECT ID AS sensorId
FROM ExampleStream
RETAIN 60 SECONDS
WHERE Observation= '' Outlet"

Battery
• Battery data is both interesting in itself,
and also important to maintain the app
usable.
• Battery consumptions is telling a lot
about the environment of the phone:
temperature, moisture, even air
pressure can be derived using the
change in charge.

Powersaving Strategies
• (Asynchronous data transfer)
• Data is not contiuously transfered from the phone to our backend. This is trivial of course.
• Lower sampling rate
• not good. You loose details that you might need.
• Controlled sampling rate
• much better: someone walking does not change location as quickly as someone on a train;
hence location tracking every 2 minutes or so is sufficient. Of course you have to detect and
predict the behavior of the user first ;)
• Piggybacking on other apps
• this would be straightforward. However, most operting systems keep apps siloed so data is
collected for each app seperatly.
• Co-processor for the data
• Apple has introduced the M7 coprocessor recently. The M7 stores all sensor data
seamlessly; battery drainage is hugely reduced.

Spooky Wifi
• You can't avoid tracking others
involunarily, too. This is a problem.
People might be aware, what they
themselves are doing. But others
might be tracked along without giving
their consent.
• Wifi is a good example of "others-
tracking": all wifi signals within reach
are tracked by the phone. It tells a lot
about other people; not only about
the devices they use.

Identify whereabouts by
location-specific magnetic field
• Every place has a distinct
signature of the magnetic field
(in strenght like shown on my
own tracking data on the right
as well as in bearing).
• So even if someone decided
to not-track geolocation, we
might still get sufficient
information on their
whereabouts via other
measurements.
• That this is not hypothetical
can be seen on the diagram:
the field's signature of my
home is different from other
places, I stayed during that
week.

Lifelogging vs. Others-Tracking
• Next page shows some lifelogging pictures I took with the Narrative lifelogging device.
• First (as Jillian York so eloquently twittered): there is many things you'd rather not like to see of
other people's lives.
• Second: you can hardly avoid to log not only your own life but also get others on your track
record as well.
• Google glass, provoking already some resistance, is however just a form-factor, a "metaphor":
the interesting thing is the augmented ubiquity (Bruce Sterling's term), that comes with is.

Postprivacy, and communalization of
private life
• In Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", we read about the 'Central
Intelligence Corporation' - a commercialized version of today's
NSA. Mobile health, computational social science, and mass
measurement of environmental influences are obvious and
benign applications of QS for the public good. With quantifying
and making public, what European data protection law defines as
"the most intimate personal data", however do we transform the
current "knowledge-database" character of the Net along with its
communication-networks to something new, something that
might become similar to Stephenson's vision?
• Could this even lead to Teilhard's (resp. McLuhan's) angelization
of humans, not only connected via social media but bodily knit
into the data? Would we rather end up in a rally bucolic global
village with moral control by the panoptic community (and an
inherent abelism that comes with a village life)? In both aspects,
representative aggregates like society as well as the concept of
the individual might be rendered obsolete.

"Privacy"

"Data Protection"

Becoming cyborgs?
• The bodily extension into the data
squere - this is what cyborgism is
really about.
• People like Neal Harbison or Enno
Park are pushing the discussion in
that direction: How do we maintain
posession of our bodies? What
ethic framework has there to be set-
up? How do we avoid technological
extensions becoming "black boxes"
that control us, rather than we do
them?
• So it is worthwhile to follow the
proceedings of the Cyborg e.V that
Enno founded.

Cyborg Rights

Some links
• http://datarella.com/blog
• http://beautifuldata.com my blogs.
• http://twitter.com/jbenno/bigdata a data science related twitter list.
• http://quantifiedself.com
• http://cyborgs.cc/

Jörg Blumtritt
@jbenno
Datarella GmbH
Oskar-von-Miller-Ring 36
80333 München
089/44 23 69 99
info@datarella.com
Mobile Data: Unter the Hood. Datarella - Joerg Blumtritt34

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